Daniel

Overview

Daniel was a young Judean noble carried into exile in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, who rose to high office in the Babylonian and Persian courts and became one of Scripture’s own examples of wisdom and integrity maintained under a pagan empire. The book bearing his name is treated at Book of Daniel.

Life and Ministry

Taken to Babylon as a young man, Daniel was trained for royal service together with three companions (Dan. 1:3-7). When Nebuchadnezzar’s own wise men could neither recall nor interpret his troubling dream and were sentenced to death for it, Daniel sought God’s help and revealed both the dream and its meaning, “in every matter of wisdom” surpassing the wise men of the kingdom tenfold (Dan. 1:20; 2:1-45).¹ He continued to serve under Belshazzar and, after Babylon’s fall, under Darius the Mede, where jealous rivals engineered a decree forbidding prayer to anyone but the king. Daniel kept praying three times a day, kneeling by his open window toward Jerusalem exactly as he had always done, and was thrown into the lions’ den for it, from which God delivered him unharmed (Dan. 6:1-23).

Theological Contribution

McCormick reads Daniel as standing in the line of Joseph: a wise man whose wisdom, expressly not his own but God’s, becomes the means of saving others who could not save themselves. Just as Nebuchadnezzar’s own wise men “rightly point out that the wisdom Nebuchadnezzar seeks lies only with ‘the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh’” (Dan. 2:11), Daniel’s God-given interpretation preserves the very wise men who had failed and were condemned to die alongside him (Dan. 2:48).¹ On this reading, Daniel foreshadows a pattern completed only in Christ: a wise man who acts on behalf of those who could not act for themselves.

Daniel’s prayer under Darius’s decree has also served as a model against the charge that public prayer is mere hypocrisy, “to be seen of men” (Matt. 6:5). Ridgley defends Daniel’s open prayer at his window on the ground that it was done neither for the esteem of onlookers nor as a new practice adopted to make a show, but exactly as Daniel “did aforetime,” and “at the peril of his life”: rather than performed for applause, it was offered “in contempt of that vile decree” of the king, making it, in Ridgley’s judgment, “one of the most noble instances of zeal for the worship of the true God” recorded in Scripture.²

Historical Significance

Ezekiel names Daniel alongside Noah and Job as one of three men whose righteousness was proverbial: “though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness” (Ezek. 14:14). Calvin observes that this reference is remarkable because, unlike Noah and Job, Daniel was Ezekiel’s own contemporary and still alive when Ezekiel wrote, “who it is well known had then in the bloom of youth given an incomparable display of piety.”³ Daniel’s reputation for righteousness was therefore not a verdict later ages settled on him in retrospect, but one he had already earned within his own lifetime, while still a young man in a foreign court.

Related Doctrines

References

Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 217-218. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 4, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), 41-42. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 20, sec. 23, 172. ↩